i whored for art…

Isabelle Schad’s Der Bau at Ufer Studios

Isabelle and her Bau again, and again in Uferstudios (which reminds me, we haven’t been to Barrikade in a long time), and our introducer, Guido will be here, as well as Mirko, in a week from today. Go and see. That is all.

Description
Der Bau (The Burrow) is a continuation of the work started in 2008 that manifested itself concretely in the series UNTURTLED #1 through #4. In this series of pieces, the costume was considered as a transitional object: at once a prothesis of the missing last layer of the body, and simultaneously the first encompassing external space. The costume as organ makes possible an exploration of the body and the space around it can generate, as space, and as a stage, and as a scenography.

Kafka’s novella Der Bau, where the burrow is described as a space deriving from the body itself, yet still belonging to it — bearing the form, traces, odours, wastes and reserves, hope and despair — seemed a good basis for further explorations of conceiving this new relationship between body and space…

During the creation process it became clear that space itself is an organ, and it should be seen as an extension, a prolongement of the body. Rilke’s statement about Rodin (Rodin does not sculpt the body, but the spaces around them) can serve as the guideline to understand this idea.

The sphere of the intimate is the first space around the body; it is the space needed by the body to feel its integrity free of any threat. It is a transitional space, in the technical sense of ‘a transitional object’, both part of the body and part of the world. The entire surrounding space is of the same order, namely a fully humanised space in which a person is confronted only with oneself.

The burrow is the concatenation and flattening of all these layers. Verticality is not part of the perceptio-motor sensations: we orient ourselves with front and rear, left and right, not up and down; the human experience takes place on a plane.

The neutral cube of the theatre, to which the three abstract dimensions of physical space refer, neutralises nothing. It makes it possible for the third dimension (the vertical dimension as the spectacular one) to appear (in the sense of existing or having a place to exist). The higher we climb, the closer we are to grand spectacle, special effects, deus ex machina, immense projections, smoke and lights; the level of the ground is always an anti-spectacular trend.

So, we built a two-dimensional, planar, fluid space of large sheets of fabric. These external tissues are dealt with like internal tissues, and they respond with a surprisingly alive manner, at the same time as part of the body, as a shell, and as a partner.